I guess it's time

[RiceisNice]

An interesting thought:

The catch up patches are an alternative to a level up potion for 60 content. They do it so everyone can gear up & no one feels left out or overwhelmed when they hit 60/come back to the game.

Personally I'd rather work my way up from 150 to 250 bc I find it fun, but it seems people(from my experience & in general) would rather be handed their stuff so they can get to the meat of the end game only to realize there isn't much meat there..they expected a whole cow & got a rat leg.

The way it's designed right now, you're most likely skipping 150 straight to 210 because of tomestones.

he pacing of patches however is tuned to accommodate people who only play one job. Ever noticed that pattern? It takes roughly 3 months to gear out one job in full tomestone equip and roughly every 3 months new upgrade options become available

And when you add relevant "horizontal progression" on the single-job level to the point that single job players don't get bored, you kill off multi-jobs entirely. And all the while, you also need to keep in mind that you cannot make gear so tedious to obtain that casuals cannot make noteworthy progress in the little time they have or you'll lose that demographic.

I can't say I envy the devs here :3

It takes 2 months at the most to fully gear up a single job through lore and proto midan (at the time of 3.2 anyway, now we have upgraded lore), and that's assuming you're going for weapon which is 7 weeks by itself. And even then, the process of it is simple enough that you could manage that in 3-4 hours of total gameplay per week. The catchup patches honestly don't help me stay with the game because it's very little reason for me to, especially since I'm not raiding anymore where the gear isn't even exciting to obtain.

Plus, some people have a preference for keeping their gameplay the same, aka stale.

There's a difference between keeping the formula the same, and the gameplay the same. Espesically for something we're paying for in a sub for new content, it really should not be reskins of mobs and telegraph, or content that entirely relies on said gameplay of reskins (Diadem and aquapolis, and possibly palace of the dead). Don't forget that this is supposed to be a theme-park mmo that encompasses most of the preferences. There are also players who want content that ultimately does not fall to "kill this dodo that has a frontal breath aoe" over and over again. The numbers speak for itself, but we don't have that. However, I've never seen WoW discussions consistently and frequently go on this long this sort of discussion up until the days of MoP and WoD, and they have the sub numbers to reflect the state of the game. That's some sort of indicator that a good amount of players (those that probably aren't playing the game mind you, if they are posting) are currently dissatsified and want to voice why (espesically with the lack of player input when they do cancel their subs)